Before you start reading, let me just say that yes, I am a Star Trek fan. And a Star Wars fan. And a Firefly fan.
We all have mental models - ways of understanding how the world works. Some mental models help us understand the world around us, and some help us understand the world within us - our mindscape, our sense of self, our own existence.
I have friend who understands himself as a tree. He's got roots going deep down into the ground, and he's got a trunk that grows up towards the sky. His roots are like his introverted side, and his trunk is like what he presents to the world. "If I'm not well rooted, my trunk is unstable, even if it looks good to other people." I think there's a bible verse that he is basically paraphrasing. It's a profound way of thinking about how we need to exist in both the seen and the unseen realms.
Another friend of mine is a business student. He told me that he has a board room in his mind. When he has problems, a group of people representing all the different sides of the issue sit around the table and talk it out.
My mental model is a spaceship. I can't remember how long I've thought of myself in this way, but it's certainly been a long time. On my spaceship, there is a diverse crew. Some of them are men, and some of them are women - I am a woman, but this is not a 100% female crew.
Some of the crew members are older than my actual age, and some of them are younger. In fact, some of them are much, much younger. What this aspect of my mental model does for me is help me to see that in some areas of life, I am doing great - perhaps even more mature than the age I am - but in some areas, I have room to grow. By understanding some parts of myself as younger than others, it allows a certain freedom, a freedom to let some dimensions of myself be young if they need to, and learn lessons along the way.
Right now, I am 32 years old. But what if the lover in me, or the artist in me, or the financial negotiator in me, is only 12?
My spaceship has a great captain. She is a strong, confident woman. She is a person who gets things done. She is capable, decisive, and firm. My captain manages things, including other crew members. She makes sure that the ship that is me shows up to important meetings and does what it needs to do to be successful. I guess that maybe a neurologist would tell me that my captain's seat is in the prefrontal region of my brain.
My captain is awesome. But she also has her limits, and importantly, my captain is not me.
On my spaceship there is an easy going, friendly guy who works well with people and is usually seeking to find harmony - both inside the spaceship and outside of the spaceship. The captain doesn't have this trait, and she's had to learn over time to listen to this guy, because his need for harmony is important. He's a bit more chilled out, and he brings a quality of listening, of slowing down, and of being open to situations and people.
There's also a guy who I sometimes think of as a pilot of the ship. He makes quick, instinctual decisions, sort of "flies by the seat of his pants." He's quick to get fired up, and quick to run down a path of passion, wanting to fly the ship and all of its resources after something quickly.
This guy has a lot of raw, fiery, passionate energy. But it needs to be checked. Tension arises in me - the spaceship, if this guy gets out of control and isn't listening to the captain. Luckily, as the spaceship has grown and evolved, this guy and the the rest of the crew have worked out good boundaries and good working relationships so that - usually - his energy is used productively, rather than destructively.
There is a crew member on my ship who is concerned exclusively with logic and numbers. This person doesn't have a gender and doesn't experience emotions. They calculate things. They look at a pay check and assess how much of it should go towards savings, how much of it should go towards paying off debt, and how much more money I would ideally earn to arrive at x, y, or z that the ship is currently trying to reach.
And then there's the shaman - or maybe she's an artist. Or maybe she's like a friendly ghost that haunts the ship. I'm not really sure how to describe her. Maybe she's the heart, or the soul, of my real life. In some ways, she is the most important crew member on the ship. Or maybe she's the precious cargo that the ship is carrying, the ultimate reason for the ship's existence.
The shaman understands of the universe that the spaceship is moving through in ways that the other crew members don't. She has insight that no one else onboard can comprehend. But she has her limits. She isn't a manager. She isn't someone who can handle making a lot of small decisions about daily operations on the ship. The shaman is an introvert. She is easily overwhelmed.
Things in my life fell apart once. My friend committed suicide, I moved, I was looking for a job, and I got really sick. My captain got really tired and needed to rest. That's the best way that I can explain myself during that time - I was like a ship without a captain. Other crew members tried to hold it together and manage things, but it didn't work. The shaman ended up taking on responsibilities that weren't hers to begin with, and she couldn't handle them.
But what's interesting is that since then, she shaman and the captain have formed a much stronger relationship based on mutual respect. This is really important, because it wasn't always so harmonious between the shaman and the captain on my spaceship. Sometimes, the captain would ignore or shut down the shaman because she felt that the shaman was getting in the way of the mission. And then the shaman would start acting out in radical, mystical ways until finally the captain would listen. Now, the captain understands that the shaman has valuable insight, and that it is her job to listen to the shaman and steer the ship in the direction that the shaman believes it needs to go.
Really, I don't know how many crew members there are on my spaceship. There are many, and they sometimes come and go. Different crew members want different things and are motivated by different things. Sometimes, I meet crew members that I didn't even know existed until I find out that they have a problem, or that they are causing a problem. Over time, the captain and other crew members have gotten better about listening in these situations. What's going on with that crew member? Why are they acting out like that? What do they need?
When children act out, that can be the most difficult to deal with - because children are like parts of myself that I've really not been paying attention to, or haven't been allowing to grow. Or maybe, they were traumatised, and frozen in time. Children are out of control, in a certain way. But they also have a massive capacity for learning that adults don't have. If they are understood as being within a framework of supportive adults that will provide guidance and boundaries as best they can, they will grow up to be functioning adults - and often quite quickly - as this is my mental model, not physical reality, time and age don't operate in a proportionally linear way.
Sometimes, children are supported by adults within my spaceship, and sometimes they - and other crew members - are supported by people outside my spaceship. I feel like in many of my closest relationships, there is an exchange between crew. Sometimes, when I am feeling down or having a moment of panic, my best friend acts like a captain for me. She can be the strong captain in moments where mine isn't strong. Sometimes, my mom or older adults in my life still act like adult crew members and advise the children that live on my ship. My spaceship isn't alone in the universe, though it is its own, independent ship. This isn't the spaceship Voyager, out alone in the Delta quadrant, it's more like a loosely affiliated member of a fleet.
One important thing about my spaceship is that the ship itself is - as you might expect - run largely on automatic processes of the computer. In some ways, the computer's programming is really what controls the ship. The captain takes charge, but she takes charge of a ship that's already been programmed to behave a certain way. Because my mom is a hypnotherapist, I guess it's natural that I would understand the spaceship of my existence in terms of these built in programs. But what's also important is that if some part of the ship's programming is causing problems, it can be changed. It might take work, and it might be stressful, but flaws in the original programming of the ship can be transformed. Sometimes, new information arises and the crew are aware that old processes are no longer helpful. Sometimes, they have to get in and mess with wires and sub-processes.
Occasionally, crew members themselves are no longer helpful. Sometimes, they have to go away - for the best of the ship. I guess you can think of this as killing people. But sometimes, they choose to die. It's happened before that the captain has literally had to put someone to death, though, because they weren't helping and they weren't going to adapt, and they wouldn't leave. This is rare, but it does happen. I've also had changes in major crew members. My captain is not the same person she was when I was 15, or 20, or 25. Sometimes, I actually wonder if I've got an entirely different person sitting in that captain's chair. I wonder if when I was a teenager, a different part of my brain was more involved with running the show.
I guess that our analogies of ourselves and our worlds show a lot about our ontologies. I told my friend about my spaceship analogy and she laughed. "Well, you are always out on adventurous missions. And you do really like boats. And Star Trek." I asked her what her version would be, and she paused for a moment. Then she said "I guess my brain is like a party." I laughed at this, because it made a lot of sense. She added, "I'm like all these voices having fun and talking and chatting and sometimes getting out of control in the corner and sometimes engaging in philosophy on the couch. I'm like all the voices." She is an amazing networker, both personally and professionally, someone who strings ideas and people together in profound ways. She's also ADHD. I believe that, quite literally, her head is like a party.
But me, for better or for worse, I'm a spaceship.